They were compressed to shit back then. Like 96kbps bitrate or something. (way before variable bitrate was a thing).

I remember them being like 1.5-3 mb each. Not that bad of a download with a 56k

Ah yes, I remember when a 1MB download took 30 minutes to 1 hour to complete.

Now I don't even blink over hitting a webpage with multiple megs of assets.

The hacker news favicon is bigger than most webpages of the time :D

I had a 56k modem, but in practice, I could seldom get 3kbps. Just a bit too rural. 2 - 2.5 was usually what I got.

I have a hunch that you're mixing up bits and bytes in that memory, because I very distinctly remember seeing the internet explorer 4 download progress indicator telling me that I was getting 4.5 "KBPS" down on a 48K link, which makes sense when you convert kilobits per second to kilobytes per second. Internet Explorer would give download speeds in kilobytes per second. If you were getting 3 kilobytes per second, then that's equivalent to ~28.8 kilobits per second, which my buddy who lived out in the middle of nowhere would get. He would come to my house in town so he could get better performance in Runescape. This was in 2003. I am not joking.

You have the right idea -- I wasn't mixing them up, but as you note, I expected to be able to get more than 3KBPS on a 56.6k link. I still managed to download about 3,000 songs on that link, though! I was very dedicated. I couldn't actually browse the internet while downloading, so I had to queue up webpages, or just find something else to do while I downloaded a single song.